The Iron Game eBook

CHAPTER XXII.

A CARPET-KNIGHT.

Jack meanwhile sank into incurable gloom. The
memory of Kate’s mute, reproachful look, her
heart-broken outcry, never quitted him. He woke
at times with the dead eyes of Wesley staring into
the night at him, the convicting gaze of Kate fastened
upon him. He must fly, or he must die in this
abhorred, guilt-haunted atmosphere. Olympia saw
this, Mrs. Atterbury saw it, and the first week in
November Rosedale was turned over to the military
and the household re-established in the stately house
in the official quarter of Richmond, where the bustle
and movement of new conditions gave Jack’s mind
another direction, or, rather, took it from the bitter
brooding that threatened madness.

When the sun accepted the wind’s challenge to
contest for the traveler’s cloak, I dare say
all the spectators of the novel highway robbery—­the
moon, the stars, the trees, birds and beasts, and others
that the fable does not mention—­took odds
that the wind would snatch off the wayfarer’s
garment in triumph. However, the wind whipped
and thrashed the poor man in vain. The stronger
it blew and the more it walloped the cloak’s
folds, the tighter and more determinedly the traveler
held on to it, as he plodded wearily over the hillside.
But when the sun came caressingly, inspiring gentle
confidence, bathing the body in warm moisture, the
tenacious hold was relaxed, then the disputed coat
was thrown over his arm, and as the vista spread far
away in golden light, the victim cast the garment
by the wayside and the sun came off victor. Youth
is despoiled of the garment of grief in this sort.
Congenial warmth, the sunshine of friendliness, soon
relax the mantle of woe, and the path that looks wintry
and hard becomes a way of light and gayety.

It was by mingling—­at first perfunctorily—­in
the gayety of the Confederate capital that Jack lost
the melancholy in which the tragedy at Rosedale had
clothed his spirits. At worst, the calamity was
over; he had been a guiltless vengeance in the punishment
of Wesley’s treason. So he took bond in
hope of better things to come. With a stout heart,
strong limbs, a plowman’s appetite, and a natural
bent to joyousness, a youth of twenty-two or three
is not apt to mistake his memories for his hopes and
hang the horizon in black when the sun is shining in
his eyes!

Richmond, always the center of a fascinating society,
was at that time exuberant in her young metropolitan
glories. It was the gayest capital in the Western
hemisphere. To resist its seductions would have
tasked the self-denial of a more constant anchorite
than our dashing Jack ever aspired to be, in the lowest
stage of his martial vicissitudes. There was
nothing of the garishness of the parvenu in the capital’s
display. The patrician caste ruled in camp and
court. The walls that had echoed to the oratory
of Jefferson, Henry, Washington, Randolph, now housed